26 July 2016

(Or: How the Modern Age turned the tables on Antiquity)

The Modern Age was inaugurated ontologically in the 17th century with the positing of the subject of consciousness, most consummately in the thinking of Descartes. Pronouncing consciousness as the subject already turns the subject (_hypokeimenon_) of ancient Greek thinking on its head, for it was the under-lying _hypo-keimenon_ (from _hypo_ 'under' and _keimai_ 'to lie') that was addressed by the _logos_ of both everyday and philosophical thought.

The guiding question of Greek philosophy, and especially Socrates and Plato, was _ti estin...;_, "What is...?" addressed to the under-lying sub-ject to investigate what it is, i.e. its whatness, quidditas or essence. The question of whatness remains the lead question throughout Antiquity and even into the Christian Middle Ages with their theology investigating what God is.

With Descartes' "cogito ergo sum", "I cogitate/think/feel/sense/perceive, therefore I am", the subject of consciousness is posited. It is not a syllogism with a conclusion, as the word "therefore" misleadingly suggests. There are not even two premises which could be closed together 'syl-logistically' in a con-clusion. Rather, an encapsulated consciousness is posited as the new essence of the subject. This subjective consciousness is confronted with an external world consisting of objects (Gegen-stände) standing over against it.

Antiquity's question, What is the subject (_hypokeimenon_)?, posed in the third person singular is transformed into a positing assertion of certitude, "I am", in the first person, of the Modern Age. The subject of consciousness is posited hermeneuticaly as the fundamentum inconcussum, i.e. the unshakable foundation of encapsulated consciousness, from whose secure base the external world is to be interrogated. This interrogation takes place primarily through scientific theoretical models constructed by consciousness, preferably mathematically, into which experimental data from the external world of objects are fed for testing the theory in question. So long as the theory holds up to experimental verification, this is said to be objective truth.

Who reflects today upon this momentous shift from the third person singular to the first person singular? Who has even noticed it? Why is this first-person subject of consciousness still regarded as some kind of what, especially for scientific purposes, thus perverting first person back into third person? Why is this perversion not clearly seen for what it is? Why has there not been a concurrent shift from the ancient question regarding the whatness of the third-person _hypokeimenon_ to the question regarding the whoness of the first-person subject of consciousness? Why is the very word, 'whoness', or its Latin equivalent, 'quissity', still a strange neologism today? Whereas 'whatness' or 'essence' are accepted as more or less 'natural'?

This state of affairs is not only an oversight due to the growing poverty of thinking in the present age, but also a question of power, of effective power and social power -- a question that is systematically suppressed by institutions of learning.

10 July 2016

Excerpt from an ongoing discussion:It's
interesting to take a look at Hegel, who makes the valiant
attempt to turn Western logic into ontology in what must be one
of the most difficult works of the entire philosophical
tradition.

"Something moves not in that in this now it is here and in
another now there, but only in that in one and the same now it
is here and not here, in that in this here it is and is not simultaneously. One
has to concede to the old dialecticians [e.g. Zenon ME] the
contradictions which they point out in movement, but it does not
follow from this that therefore movement is not [non-existent],
but rather, that movement is the existing contradiction
itself."

Notice that the term "simultaneously" is temporal, just as
the term, _hama_, in Aristotle's formulation of the principle of
non-contradiction in Met. Book Gamma, meaning 'simultaneously',
also is temporal. Contra Hegel, it is not "one and the same now", but the simultaneity of presence and absence at the same time, i.e. in the same ecstatically stretched, time-clearing, that enables something in motion to be here and also not here.
Movement is the "existing contradiction", and this
contradiction can only exist because the temporal dimensions
of presence and absence presence together, i.e.
'simultaneously'. Hegel does not get this far, but Heidegger
does, at least implicitly. The 3D 'time-clearing', as I call
it, is capacious, capacious enough also for contradictions
to 'exist', i.e. stand out ec-statically in the existential
time-clearing. It is the tacit presupposition of
Aristotle's ontology of movement itself: _dynamis -
energeia - entelecheia_: potential - energetic movement -
actual, perfected presence. The "existing contradiction"
of movement is only possible as such in its identity with
the temporally 3D, triple vision of human being (Dasein)
itself.The 'contradiction' of the simultaneity of absencing and presencing is what
enables movement at all. The logical principle of non-contradiction excludes such
simultaneity -- all the worse for logic. And such simultaneity is nothing other than the unity of
presence and absence in the time-clearing.

I also think that with the so-called 'scientific discovery' of
quantum indeterminacy around 1925 (Heisenberg and Schrödinger),
which was not 'experimental' but the blind consequence of the
mathematical theories employed, the end of science was reached,
i.e. its final, teleological, com-pletion, consummation, and simultaneously its
demise. Its nemesis was time itself which ultimately repudiates
mathematization.

With the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927, the
alternative was already given, i.e. the keys to another age but,
of course, science did not give up and has not taken up Sein
und Zeit one whit. On the contrary, it has continued for a
further century without let-up on the road of effectivity, remaining blind and without any
resolution of the creakiness of its foundations, of its unsolved problems, starting with that of so-called quantum gravity, an open sore festering now for well nigh a century.

Modern science is wounded, and a wounded beast is all the
more savage and dangerous. It hides its wound and will remain in self-denial for as long as possible. Through its agents, the scientists, it will preserve its privileges, its honours and glowing reputation, at all costs, repudiating any
other thought that comes along, dismissing it as fanciful, as 'non-verifiable', as 'useless'. And who notices today that this is our situation? Not the media, not the scientists, physical or social, of course, and not the scholars, including the academic philosophers, even those with an hermeneutical, phenomenological bent. Thinking thinks very slowly, waiting patiently for the attentive recipients of its messages.Further reading: